Introduced as someone who has read the Obama health care legislation from “cover to cover,” former Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey spoke Monday at the Conservative Party’s Political Action Conference about the dangers in health care today.
“We are in the fight of our lifetime,” said McCaughey.
In remarks that were very well received by the crowd at the Holliday Inn on Wolf Road in Colonie, McCaughey stressed the threat to freedom, values and our way of life that exists because of “Obamacare.”
She argued that the legislation shifts money, about half a billion dollars, away from Medicare and into Medicaid. The older crowd responded audibly to this point, as McCaughey highlighted how the changes would ruin the quality of life for senior citizens. She cautiously walked way back from the death panels she was scaring people about in 2009, to the point where she never actually mentioned them.
Now that “Obamacare” has been passed, McCaughey said the next frontier is in the court systems, with 26 states challenging the legislation’s constitutionality, and in the U.S. House of Representatives, which will try to remove funds from this measure. “We’re going to starve the beast,” she said.
McCaughey’s message then moved into other fiscal issues and what she described as a bloated federal budget, including the money spent on foreign aid. This perpetual enemy of conservatives was again used as a punching bag, as she noted that aid will increase 50 percent over the next five years. “We need it right here at home,” said McCaughey.
In New York State the big fiscal message was the repeal of the state’s corporate tax in the upper 50 counties. McCaughey said this proposal would attract businesses, which would increase revenue through personal income and sales taxes.
The big news for the future, though, was when McCaughey asked if she would run against U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in 2012, when she runs for her first full term.
McCaughey, who seemed happy to be asked the question, said, “I would consider it.”
(A version of this article appeared online in the Daily Gazette at http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2011/jan/31/0131_health/)
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